Municipal Water Leader July 2019

Volume 6 Issue 6

July 2019

Commissioner Brenda Burman: The Promise of the DCP

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Municipal Water Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for May/June and November/December by

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Nicole E. Venable, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer

6

Commissioner Brenda Burman: The Promise of the DCP

Contents July 2019 Volume 6, Issue 6

5 The DCP: A Great Accomplishment

By Kris Polly

22 Implementing the DCP in Arizona: Tom Buschatzke of the ADWR

6 Commissioner Brenda Burman: The Promise of the DCP

26 A Remarkable Achievement: Metropolitan’s Jeffrey Kightlinger on the DCP

12 Conserving a Crucial Water Source: John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority 16 The View From the Upper Basin: Wyoming's Pat Tyrrell on the DCP

THE INNOVATORS

30 Apana’s Intelligent Water Management Platform 34 Digitizing and Strengthening Board Governance with Diligent

4 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

ADVERTISING: Municipal Water Leader accepts one-quarter, half-page, and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

CIRCULATION: Municipal Water Leader is distributed to irrigation district managers and boards of directors in the 17 western states, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials, members of Congress and committee staff, and advertising sponsors.

For address corrections or additions, please contact our managing editor, Joshua Dill, at joshua.dill@waterstrategies.com.

Copyright © 2019 Water Strategies LLC. Municipal Water Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Municipal Water Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Municipal Water Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Municipal Water Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised.

MunicipalWaterLeader.com MuniWaterLeader

COVER PHOTO:

Comissioner Brenda Burman.

Photo courtesy of Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BUREAU OF RECLIMATION.

Correction: In an interview in our April issue, Mark Jockers of Oregon’s Clean Water Services stated that one of the pioneers of the purified-water-to-beer movement was based in Orlando, Florida. In fact, the Florida New Water Brew project was spearheaded by Bart Weiss in Florida’s Hillsborough County.

We regret the error.

SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions. However, the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

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The DCP: A Great Accomplishment

T

he Drought Contingency Plan (DCP), signed on May 20, is a milestone in the management of the Colorado River. Developed by the seven Colorado River basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—plus Mexico and passed as federal law, it mandates ambitious, cooperative efforts to increase storage in Lakes Mead and Powell. In this month’s Municipal Water Leader, we talk to some of the people who played the biggest role in negotiating and passing the DCP. Our cover interview with Commissioner Brenda Burman of the Bureau of Reclamation, who congratulates the basin states on their accomplishment—but stresses the pivot to implementation that must now occur. Pat Tyrrell, the longtime Wyoming State Engineer, talks to us about the view from the upper Colorado River basin and the importance of the DCP for avoiding harmful curtailments to Wyoming water users. John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), tells us about his agency’s distinct relationship to the Colorado River—it is highly dependent on the Colorado to supply the state’s biggest population centers. Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, walks us through the process by which his state developed its negotiating position and explains how the DCP interacts with Arizona’s preexisting conservation efforts. Finally, we speak with Jeff Kightlinger, the general manager of the Metropolitan

By Kris Polly

Water District of Southern California, about the significance of the DCP for Southern California and the actions his agency is already taking.

While a great leap forward has been made on the Colorado, water technology companies are keeping up their incremental march towards ever-more-sophisticated water management.

Matt Rose, the chief executive officer of APANA, tells us in this issue about his company’s low-power, wide-area radio and Internet of things technologies, which allow it to carefully monitor water use across multiple buildings—or even across an entire city. Trevor Vale of Diligent tells us about his company’s digital corporate governance platform—which will be of interest to any organization that has a board of directors.

The significance of the DCP cannot be overstated. It is an example of cooperation and success that should be studied and emulated by water managers across the United States. I hope that the interviews in this month’s issue of Municipal Water Leader will help you do just that. M Kris Polly is editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and president of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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Commissioner Brenda Burman: The Promise of the DCP

O

together with Mexico to immediately and simultaneously save water in both countries. They are doing that because the Colorado River is experiencing a historic drought. The 19-year period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest in our recorded history, which goes back over 100 years. It’s also one of the driest periods in the paleo record, looking back over 1,200 years. Working with the states, we all recognized that there was too high a risk of us losing the system and of there being severe repercussions in the Southwest if actions were not taken. The basin states came together with the U.S. Department of the Interior to design voluntary actions that could reduce this risk and allow everyone to move forward with coordinated and dependable actions to protect the system.

Kris Polly: Please explain the DCP and its significance.

Kris Polly: With the passage of the DCP legislation, what are the next steps?

Brenda Burman: The finalization of the DCP for the upper and lower basin states of the Colorado River is an incredible feat. The DCP isn’t just one agreement; it is a multifaceted set of actions and agreements by those seven states and Mexico to move forward to address significant risks on the Colorado River system. The states have come

6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Brenda Burman: It took us several years of negotiations with Mexico and with the states to get this far, and it wasn’t easy. The states and major water users had to be able to go home and argue that there should be more water savings and more water maintained behind Lake Powell and Lake

PHOTO COURTESY OF BUREAU OF RECLAMATION.

n May 20, 2019, representatives of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation, key water districts, and the seven Colorado River basin states gathered at the top of Hoover Dam to sign the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP), an ambitious agreement designed to reduce risk on the Colorado River and sustain the river system into the future.

As the federal agency responsible for water management in the West, Reclamation played a pivotal role in helping to facilitate the development and successful passage of the DCP at the federal level. In this interview, Brenda Burman, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about the process of developing the DCP and its promise for the future.

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Representatives of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Colorado River basin states gather on May 20 at Hoover Dam.

Mead. That may turn out to have been easy compared to implementation, which is what we are working on now. The DCP is designed to be in place through 2026.

It will work as an overlay to the 2007 guidelines for the operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which will also extend to 2026. Our main goal, starting the day after the agreement was signed on May 20, is to move forward with implementation. That means that we are working with Mexico to put together the implementation details of its scarcity plan, which will allow it to work simultaneously with the United States to save water behind Lake Mead.

Implementation is different for each state and each basin. The upper basin states will be moving forward with implementing different methods of saving water behind Lake Powell. They’re going to have to work both individually and with each other to figure out how to make that happen. In the lower basin, the situations of Arizona, California, and Nevada are very different. Those states have worked hard to make sure that they’re ready to make specific and certain contributions of water to keep Lakes Mead and Powell out of crisis.

Republic of Mexico have taken to address the problems and challenges on the river. Those steps go all the way back to the 2001 Interim Surplus Guidelines, the 2007 Coordinated Operations and Shortage Guidelines for Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and numerous historic agreements with Mexico. The DCP is yet another step that the basin states, water users, and the two countries are taking together to address the question of the sustainability of the Colorado River.

Kris Polly: What must happen on the Colorado River system to ensure sustainability into the future?

Kris Polly: What is your message to Congress now that the DCP has been passed?

Brenda Burman: The DCP is an incremental step in a long line of impressive steps that the basin states, key water districts, the Department of the Interior, and the

Brenda Burman: The DCP took several years to come together. When it did, it occurred with the support of the states, major water users, tribes, NGOs, and other

Kris Polly: What is your message to all Colorado River water users?

Brenda Burman: All the states, water districts, tribes, and NGOs that have come together should be commended for finding a path forward. This was not easy. It took real creativity. It took real sacrifice. In return, we’re creating a lot of flexibility on the river to allow people more incentives to go home and save more water. To the basin states and to all the parties that were essential to protecting the water supplies of over 40 million people, I would say, “Good job.”

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Conmissioner Brenda Burman speaks at the DCP signing ceremony.

partners. They brought this legislation to their delegations in Congress. It was bipartisan and it stretched across state lines and across the divide between agricultural and urban interests. Everybody came together to make this work. I commend the swift work of Congress and the swift work of President Trump in signing this legislation.

Kris Polly: Is there anything else that you’d like to address?

8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Brenda Burman is the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. For more information about Reclamation, visit www.usbr.gov.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BUREAU OF RECLAMATION.

Brenda Burman: Looking back at the process, I would say that deadlines matter. My first action as commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation was to travel out to the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Nevada in December 2017. I called on the basin states to finish their work to address the crisis on the Colorado River. We set timelines and we moved forward. I think that was important. The federal government was not going to sit back and let the risk on the Colorado River become too high. The Colorado River is a special place, both legally and practically, in that the secretary of the interior has the ability to step in and make things work if they have to— particularly in the lower basin. In this case, the secretary

didn’t have to, because the basin states, tribes, key water districts, and others came together to protect the system.

We have a long history of cooperation on the river, but it’s important to know that the federal government is not going to let the system fall into crisis. A lot of voluntary steps are going to need to be taken. Implementation is not going to be easy, but we’re going to learn a lot over the next 7 years, and we’re going to use all of that learning and information to help us determine what our next steps to manage the Colorado River should be based on our experience implementing the DCP. M

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The signing ceremony at Hoover Dam.

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The distinctive “bathtub ring” pattern left by falling water levels in Lake Mead.

Conserving a Crucial Water Source: John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority

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evada is allotted only 1.8 percent of the Colorado River water used by the seven Colorado basin states and Mexico, but it is perhaps the state most reliant on its allotment. This comparatively small amount of water is the predominant water source for the Las Vegas Valley, where most of the state’s population lives. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), the region’s water wholesaler, has responded to this predicament with aggressive water conservation efforts. It also played a major part in Nevada’s negotiation of the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP), the seven-state agreement that was just signed into federal law.

In this interview, SNWA General Manager John Entsminger speaks with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the new DCP legislation and what comes next.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

12 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about SNWA. John Entsminger: SNWA has seven member agencies, all of them water and wastewater utilities in southern Nevada.

The region that we cover is essentially the Las Vegas Valley and some of the outlying areas of Clark County. Those seven utilities provide retail water and sewer services to 2.2 million people. We are responsible for the water supply of 76 percent of the population of the state of Nevada.

SNWA is a wholesale agency. We build all the regional facilities, pump the water out of Lake Mead and treat it, and then deliver it at turnouts to the retail agencies. We coordinate regional conservation plans and we ensure the sustainability of the natural resources that we rely upon.

We do all the resource planning for the region to ensure a 50-year water supply every year.

PHOTO COURTESY OF.

John Entsminger: SNWA did on-campus interviews during my third year of law school at the University of Colorado Boulder and ultimately selected me. I moved from Boulder to Las Vegas in 1999 to be SNWA’s environmental compliance and water resources attorney.

I spent about 10 years in the general counsel’s office, working on in-state water resource issues, Environmental Protection Agency issues, Endangered Species Act issues, and Colorado River negotiations. In 2010, the then general manager asked me to move out of legal and onto the executive team. When she retired in 2014, the board of directors selected me to be the general manager of SNWA.

ADVERTISEMENT Joshua Dill: Why was the DCP needed?

John Entsminger: When the seven states that share the Colorado River entered into our first shortage plan under the 2007 operating guidelines, we thought the risk was much lower than we think it is today. We’ve seen the drought on the Colorado River deepen from 2007 to 2019.

The risk of Lake Mead elevations falling substantially in the next 5–6 years reached a point that convinced all of us that we needed to put additional mitigation measures in place on top of the measures agreed to in 2007. The DCP is an overlay of additional measures that will be taken by the seven Colorado River states to prevent reservoir levels in Lakes Mead and Powell from reaching truly critical elevations.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about the process by which the different parties worked out that plan.

John Entsminger: We first came together in a meaningful way in summer 2015. We not only looked at the sort of hydrology we’ve seen on the river over the historical record, but we also drilled down into the hydrology we have seen over the last 30 years and examined climate scientists’ predictions about the effects we will see on this river system over the next 50 years if temperatures increase as they’re projected to. With that sort of stress-test hydrology, we were able to assess the risk and to build a plan to systematically reduce that risk by collectively agreeing to leave more water in the system.

I can assure you that that sounds simpler than it actually was, but for the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, 85 percent of the material agreements were finished by the end of 2015. Over the next 3–4 years, people worked within their states to figure out how they could leave more water in Lake Mead while still protecting their local economies and the environment.

Joshua Dill: Who provided input into what Nevada’s position should be?

John Entsminger: Nevada is unique among the seven states in that we don’t have an agricultural sector. There is only one major user in southern Nevada. Of Nevada’s legal entitlement of 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water, SNWA has direct contracts for 272,000. There’s not much water that isn’t being used by SNWA. The planning process came down to our professional staff deciding what level of pain we could live with—how much water we could forbear from using out of our legal entitlements while still meeting our customer demands—and then briefing the elected officials who serve on our board to make sure they were on the same page. We negotiated from that position.

Joshua Dill: What else is distinct about Nevada’s situation as compared to those of the other Colorado River states?

John Entsminger: First, Nevada has far and away the smallest allocation of Colorado River water of the seven states and the country of Mexico. Nevada has a robust legal entitlement to 1.8 percent of the Colorado River water allocated to the seven states plus Mexico. SNWA is 90 percent reliant on that water source in our mission of providing 76 percent of the state’s population with water.

Everybody’s got a stake in the river, but I would say that no state is more reliant on the river than Nevada is.

Second, even though we have only 1.8 percent of the river, we are blessed with a geographic location upstream of Hoover Dam. That allows us engineering solutions to the drought that nobody else has. By April of next year, we will have completed $1.5 billion in new water delivery infrastructure into Lake Mead that guarantees that we can take water out of the lake even at elevations at which the Bureau of Reclamation can’t release water downstream.

Joshua Dill: Now that the DCP has been passed, what actions will Nevada and the federal government carry out?

John Entsminger: I think that for all intents and purposes, the DCP will come into effect during the next water year, beginning October 1, 2019. What we will need to do is leave part of our legal entitlement of water in Lake Mead whenever its water level is below specific elevations. Today, it is at 1,088 feet above sea level, which is under the first trigger level of 1,095, meaning that we would need to leave 8,000 acre-feet of water in the lake that we otherwise would be legally entitled to take out.

That’s our contribution to the plan. The amounts of water that the states need to leave in the lake increase as the lake drops. The federal government’s role is operating the system and keeping track of the accounting. Because of the Colorado River Compact, the states own all the water in the river. The federal government owns the dams and is responsible for operating the river in accordance with federal law. The DCP is a part of federal law, so it’s going to be the federal government’s job to make sure that everybody leaves the amount of water in the lake that they have agreed to and to enforce the special provisions that exist for accessing water at different times.

Joshua Dill: What would happen if the DCP were not implemented?

John Entsminger: It’s a matter of risk. According to the hydrologic modeling we were looking at, without the DCP, there’s an approximately 50 percent chance of Lake Mead falling to elevation 1,020 by the end of 2026.

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ADVERTISEMENT Elevation 1,020 is the elevation we all agreed we wanted to try to protect. At that level, there’s really not much water left in Lake Mead, and at elevation 1,000 things start to get truly dire. If there is a 50 percent chance of that occurring within the next 7 years without the DCP, the DCP cuts the probability of that happening to about 4 percent.

Joshua Dill: Are those levels bad just because there would not be enough water to supply the downstream states, or would they present engineering problems?

John Entsminger: At around elevation 1,000, there would only be about 5 million acre-feet of water left in Lake Mead. Right now, average annual releases downstream total about 9 million. There is only a little more than half of the current annual demand of Arizona, California, and Mexico left in storage at elevation 1,020. You don’t get to a real engineering problem until about elevation 900. That is when dead pool occurs and Reclamation can’t release water through Hoover Dam to downstream users.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about water conservation in your area and what SNWA is doing to reduce water use.

14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

John Entsminger: We focused on outdoor use because indoor use doesn’t matter in southern Nevada.

I mentioned the blessing of our geographic location upstream of the dam. We are practically on the shores of Lake Mead. If water hits a drain in southern Nevada, we treat it and put it back into Lake Mead; then we can take out the exact same amount again. We conserve and reuse 99 percent of water that is used indoors. The only way we lose water out of what is essentially a closed loop is through outdoor irrigation, swimming pools, evaporative coolers, and other sources of evaporation. Our community’s maniacal focus on reducing outdoor water usage is aimed at guaranteeing that we have sufficient water resources in Lake Mead.

Joshua Dill: What is your vision for the future?

John Entsminger: Here in southern Nevada, we’re going to have to do more. Our area is a world leader in municipal water conservation, but this is no time to be resting on our laurels. We still have 5,000 acres of sprayirrigated turf in this valley that is probably only walked on by the people who mow it. I’m not talking about soccer fields, schools, or good functional usage, I am talking about purely ornamental turf. That is not a luxury that our community can afford any longer. We’ve taken our rebates from $2 per square foot to $3 per square foot, and we’re ramping up our enforcement of ordinances to prevent water waste. Looking more broadly at the future of the Colorado River, everybody in every sector—agricultural, municipal, recreational, and environmental—is going to have to make do with less water. Nevada is leading the way in having a vibrant economy and using less water, but the entire basin is going to have to join in. It’s going to take real money and real political will for the entire sector to adapt to the warmer and drier future we see coming. M

John Entsminger is the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. For more information about SNWA, visit snwa.com.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SNWA.

John Entsminger: Our legal entitlement to Colorado River water is 300,000 acre-feet a year. The maximum reduction under the 2007 guidelines plus our biggest DCP reduction would equal 30,000 acre-feet of water. That essentially means that our legal entitlement is reduced to 270,000 acre-feet of water. Last year, the 2 million residents of our area consumptively used only 244,000 acre-feet off the river, so Nevada has already preconserved all of the contributions that we’re likely to need to make under the DCP. We have conserved water by aggressively limiting outdoor water use. Beginning in 2002, SNWA instituted a drought plan that was then codified in city and county ordinances as regular water conservation measures. We spent around $230 million between 2002 and today to pay people to take grass out to reduce outdoor water usage. From 2002 to 2019, as our population increased by 46 percent, or by about 650,000 people, our per capita water use went down by about 38 percent and our aggregate water usage went down by 25 percent. That’s what allows us to confidently say, “We can make our contributions under the 2007 guidelines and the DCP, and still continue to support the vibrant economy of southern Nevada.”

On the water district side of the operation, we have a 10-year, $650 million capital project that is primarily focused on asset management. We have 6,000 miles of pipe in our retail system, and less than 5 percent of our water is unaccounted for, but we’re not satisfied with that. We want to drive that down to 4 or 3 percent.

Joshua Dill: Did you cut down on outdoor water use because it used a particularly large amount of water or because it was comparatively easy to reduce?

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Glen Canyon Dam, which impounds Lake Powell, seen at night.

The View From the Upper Basin: Wyoming's Pat Tyrrell on the DCP

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he states of the upper Colorado River basin—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—have longstanding agreements among themselves to curtail Colorado River water use in situations of need. However, because there are thousands of upper basin water users, in contrast to the relatively small number of water contractors and rights holders in the lower basin, this is no simple task. As a consequence, upper basin states like Wyoming have a strong use in protecting the overall resilience of the Colorado River system so as to avoid the need to curtail use.

In this interview, Pat Tyrrell, Wyoming’s recently retired state engineer, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about various aspects of the DCP. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your position as state engineer.

16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Joshua Dill: Would you give a basic overview of why the DCP is needed?

Pat Tyrrell: We have developed demands on the river that are larger than current runoff and what years of evaluation have revealed is the river’s supply. In particular, while none of the upper basin states has fully used its apportionment under the 1922 and 1948 compacts, we do know that there is a structural imbalance in the lower basin where demand exceeds supply by about 1.2 million acre-feet a year on average. That, coupled with drought, is the reason

PHOTO COURTESY OF BUREAU OF RECLAMATION.

Pat Tyrrell: I started out with two engineering degrees from the University of Wyoming, the second one being a master’s in civil engineering with an emphasis on water resources.

Upon receiving that, I went to work for a Western water– focused consulting business in Laramie for about 8 years.

I then moved to Minnesota for 2 years to see more of the world and worked for a consulting firm there. I then moved back to Wyoming and worked in regulatory affairs for the Black Thunder coal mine for a little over 4 years. After that, I returned to consulting here in Cheyenne. I applied for

and was appointed to the position of state engineer in early 2001 and continued in that position until April 1, 2019. As state engineer, I was Wyoming’s compact commissioner on three interstate compact commissions—the Upper Colorado River Commission, the Yellowstone River Commission, and the Bear River Commission. I also represented Wyoming on the North Platte Decree Committee. I represented Wyoming on the Western States Water Council and Colorado River Salinity Control Forum and its advisory council. I held, and continue to hold, two positions related to the Colorado River: In addition to being commissioner on the Upper Colorado River Commission, I was also named, first by Governor Freudenthal, the Wyoming governor’s representative to the seven basin states.

ADVERTISEMENT the DCP is needed. In the last 12 years, we have followed the 2007 interim guidelines on shortage and coordinated reservoir operations, which were designed to get us through what looked to be a pretty tough period back in 2005. The drought we’ve seen since then has demonstrated that those guidelines weren’t strong enough. What we’re doing with the DCP is twofold: trying to cure overuse in the lower basin when Lake Mead is at low elevations and to protect the upper basin so that we can continue to meet our compact obligations at Lees Ferry until those 2007 interim guidelines are renegotiated, which should occur by the end of 2026. The DCP is a therefore a bridge to get us from the 2007 interim guidelines, which were not quite robust enough, through their renegotiation, which starts next year and goes through 2026. The experience that we’re gaining now will inform what the guidelines look like after that time.

Joshua Dill: Why were the 2007 guidelines ultimately insufficient?

Did the weather or climate develop in unexpected ways?

Pat Tyrrell: All I can say is that they were prepared with the level of knowledge we had at the time. Also, understand that what we developed was what seven states could agree to.

We have a further 12 years’ worth of knowledge now. The drought that we faced in 2007 was about 7 years long. The 2007 guidelines, even though they were helpful, did not prevent Lake Mead from continuing to drop and have not solved the structural deficit in the lower basin.

There are some good things in those guidelines, however. We coordinated the operations so that Lakes Mead and Powell were a little bit more in sync. We got the lower states, and later Mexico, to agree to voluntary shortages if Lake Mead dropped to specified levels, which have been approached but not hit.

Joshua Dill: How was the DCP planned? How did the plan change over the period during which you were negotiating it?

Pat Tyrrell: The upper and lower basins worked somewhat independently in the early years.

The states met with Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell in summer 2013 because of how bad 2012 and 2013 were. We knew that we had to take the bull by the horns again, just as we did after a similar meeting with Secretary Gale Norton back in 2005.

We suggested that the states develop a plan. The Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Department of the Interior have always preferred that the states take the lead, as it is we who hold the legal entitlements to the use of water on the river. The two basins began to prepare their DCPs somewhat independently, and around 2015–2016, we began to hear that the lower basin was going to commit to additional voluntary contributions to Lake Mead on the order of 1.1 million acre-feet annually. The substance of that plan has not changed. At the same time, we began working on Minute 323 with Mexico, which would increase the voluntary reductions to which they would commit. That minute was executed in 2017.

Concurrently, the upper basin began to develop what we thought would be the critical components of an upper basin DCP. There are three: One is continuing weather modification activity, essentially cloud seeding during winter when we have suitable weather; the second is drought response operations with the large federal reservoirs; and the third is demand management. Our main goal in the upper basin was to try to insulate our water users from the mandatory curtailment that might occur under the compact if we violated the nondepletion obligation of 75 million acre-feet every 10 years (on a running 10-year basis) at Lees Ferry. Those components developed over time. We had a pretty good

picture of what they might look like in 2017—in fact, it would have been nice to have both basins’ DCPs done at the end of 2017. However, Arizona was struggling to meet the varying demands of their large suite of users, from developers to tribes to farmers to municipalities; whatever Arizona did also had to be approved by the state’s legislature. Once we missed the end of 2017, we knew that we needed to target the end of 2018 so that Arizona’s next legislative session could address legislation in early 2019. So, for the last year and a half, we have been reviewing documents and putting final touches on them.

Back in October 2018, the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office’s and Attorney General’s representatives went on a road trip, as did those of the other states. I was part of that outreach. We talked about the plan in three different public meetings in the Green River basin and two here in Cheyenne (one of which was streamed and recorded and is available on the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office website). We felt we could get most of the way done by the end of 2018, but the Arizona legislature still had to pass authorizing legislation, and their governor needed to sign it, which occurred at the end of January 2019.

One of the prongs of the upper basin plan deals with operating our federal reservoirs, known as the Colorado River Storage Project initial units: Glen Canyon Dam, which creates Lake Powell; Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah line; Navajo in New Mexico; and the Aspinall Unit, which includes Blue Mesa, Crystal, and Morrow Point Dams in Colorado.

We know that Reclamation would move uncommitted water from the upstream facilities down to protect Lake Powell because of its overriding importance in terms of power generation and compact compliance.

The DCP gives us a seat at the table when there is a 24-month forecast that elevation 3,525 could be reached at Lake Powell and those drought operations are being contemplated.

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ADVERTISEMENT The DCP states that if this dire situation occurs, we will continue operating under drought operations until hydrology improves and the storage in the three other initial units recovers. That’s important to the people who use Flaming Gorge in southwestern Wyoming and the other units in the other states. We have committed to carrying out those operations in accordance with existing environmental records of decision on the river. We are keenly aware of the need to operate within existing environmental requirements or records of decision so that we don’t have any kind of National Environmental Policy Act issues. The states committed early on to develop a drought operations plan that respected the environmental instruments that already exist on the river.

Wyoming also has Fontenelle Reservoir, which is upriver of Flaming Gorge. Recently passed federal legislation allows the State of Wyoming to work with Reclamation to add riprap to the lower part of the upstream face of Fontenelle Dam so as to make more of the reservoir usable for Wyoming. This work would add 80,000 acre-feet to the usable capacity of that reservoir. We already have 120,000 acre-feet of contracts in Fontenelle and anticipate entering into agreements to access the additional 80,000 acre-feet when it is needed. Our hope is that, if we ever get into compact compliance issues at Lees Ferry, Wyoming’s initial contribution could come from releasing or exchanging some of the water out of Fontenelle in lieu of regulating our users.

Joshua Dill: Why was federal government action and legislation needed?

Joshua Dill: Is the DCP significantly different from other multistate agreements and compacts you’ve negotiated in the past, and if so, how?

Pat Tyrrell: It has been more complicated and has required a lot more work. Our other compacts are with one or two other states. The Upper Basin Compact involves four states,

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Joshua Dill: What would have occurred if the DCP had not been passed?

Pat Tyrrell: It is difficult to say exactly what would have happened, but the failure to pass the DCP would have taken the lower basin states’ future out of their hands. The secretary of the interior is the water master below Lake Powell. I believe that lower basin states would have been faced with the need to short junior water right holders, primarily in Arizona, and to deliver water under the secretary’s less flexible authorities rather than through a voluntary program developed by the states. In either case, less water would have been available to the lower basin.

Joshua Dill: What is distinct about the situation of the upper basin and the situation of Wyoming in particular?

Pat Tyrrell: Wyoming is in the same boat as the other three upper basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah— although I think we are the furthest away from using our full apportionment. Wyoming doesn’t have huge irrigation or conservancy districts in our basin, certainly relative to Colorado, which has a large river district out of Glenwood Springs that has significant influence in the state’s decisions on the Colorado River. In Wyoming, none of our districts is as engaged, although we work hard to keep all our water users informed of activities on the river, including the DCP. Wyoming is also the only state in the upper basin that does not have a tribal presence on the river. In Wyoming, our only Indian reservation is on the Wind (Bighorn) River side of the Wind River mountain range. M

Pat Tyrrell recently retired as Wyoming’s State Engineer. He can be contacted at ptyrre@gmail.com.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WYOMING STATE ENGINEER’S OFFICE.

Pat Tyrrell: To give you one example, there are components of the lower basin plan that might allow California, if it were to recover some of its conserved water, to physically divert a little over 4.4 million-acre feet in one calendar year.

To allow that to happen without violating other parts of the Law of the Colorado River, new legislation was required. In the upper basin we needed legislation to bless our demandmanagement storage. The plan won’t work unless we have a place to store our conserved water. The federal legislation authorizes storage for the upper basin states to use, likely in Lake Powell, at no charge. It is an authorization that doesn’t expire. If we can successfully stand up a demandmanagement program and track the saved water down to Lake Powell, we will have the ability to use 500,000 acre-feet of empty space there to store that saved water and release it only if needed to maintain compliance with the 1922 compact.

and the original 1922 Colorado River Compact involves seven. We also have another country involved, the Republic of Mexico.

It is unusual that in 2011 and again this year we have seen large floods in the Missouri basin. We have also seen a lot of water in recent years in the Snake River and in Wyoming’s Bighorn and North Platte Rivers. We’ve also had a lot of snow in Wyoming in our Upper Green River basin, especially in 2017. Nevertheless, the Colorado River basin as a whole has not seen the plentiful runoff that would be needed to keep Lakes Mead and Powell full, or at least to keep them from dropping as they have. The drought is more severe on the Colorado River than in any other basin that I deal with in Wyoming.

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Implementing the DCP in Arizona: Tom Buschatzke of the ADWR Lake Mead.

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he Colorado River supplies nearly 40 percent of Arizona’s water use, providing water through the Central Arizona Project (CAP) to farmers, municipalities, and tribal water users. CAP’s service area covers Arizona’s biggest cities, including Tucson and Phoenix, as well as nine Native American tribes and the productive agricultural land around Yuma. Given the crucial role of the Colorado River in supporting Arizona’s population and industry, the state had a strong interest in a robust and effective Drought Contingency Plan (DCP).

In this interview, Tom Buschatzke of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) speaks with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the planning and implementation of the DCP in Arizona.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Joshua Dill: Would you give us a basic explanation of why the DCP was needed?

Tom Buschatzke: The end goal of the DCP is to lower the risk of Lake Mead falling to critically low elevations.

In 2007, an agreement was put together on interim guidelines for the coordinated operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead when shortage criteria obtained. Those guidelines were also intended to lower the risk of Lake Mead falling to those unhealthy levels. At the time, the risk was in the single digits. Over time, because of the ongoing drought and other issues, that risk started to climb. In some hydrological scenarios, the risk had risen as high as 45 percent. The actions taken under the DCP are intended to reduce that risk back down into the single digits by 2026, the end of the plan period.

Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about the planning process by which the different states came to the agreement as it exists now, and how your agency contributed to Arizona’s position?

PHOTO COURTESY OF ADWR.

Tom Buschatzke: In 1982–83, as a graduate student at Arizona State University, I interned at the ADWR. I then became a permanent employee of the department, working various jobs and moving up the ranks to become a program manager in the Water Rights Adjudication Section. In March 1988, I left the department to work for the City of Phoenix. I worked for 14 years in the City of Phoenix’s Law Department on water rights and other issues, then moved in 2002 to a position as water resources policy advisor in the city manager’s office. In summer 2011, the director of the ADWR asked me to come back as assistant

director, officially overseeing all the policy prescriptions and programs performed by the department, including regulatory programs under the 1980 Groundwater Management Act. I was in that position until January 2015, when Governor Ducey nominated me to be director.

My nomination was confirmed by the Senate as required by law, and I have been the director since then.

ADVERTISEMENT Tom Buschatzke: In June 2013, the seven basin states’ principals had an audience with Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and asked her to allow the states to put together a plan recognizing increasing risks to Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The basin states’ principals had their staff-level people—in Arizona’s case that was me, as the assistant director—get in a room together for a while and consider an outside-the-box plan for all seven states. We were asked to think creatively and perhaps, as Jim Locke, the head of Denver Water, put it, to seek a grand bargain among the states for better management of the Colorado River.

Recognizing that that was a very tall order, and having worked on it for about a year, the upper and lower basins parted ways and pursued separate plans, always with the intention that the two plans would come back together to achieve their common goal. We worked on that through 2014.

The results of that process included a memorandum of understanding that allowed for the conservation of water in Lake Mead. Then, in summer 2015, Esteban Lopez, then the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, contacted the basin state and water district principals, folks who could make decisions in real time, and asked them to try to negotiate a larger deal among Arizona, California, and Nevada. We embarked on that process in July 2015. Through the rest of 2015 and into 2016, we came up with what is essentially the DCP we have now, aside from a few tweaks. I was the principal negotiator for the state of Arizona because I was the principal-level person for Arizona at the point in time at which Commissioner Lopez reached out to us.

Joshua Dill: Were there other entities within Arizona that provided their input into what the state’s position should be in the negotiations?

Tom Buschatzke: Yes. ADWR had created an ad-hoc group of Colorado River stakeholders around 2005, and it conferred with them throughout this entire process, back to its beginning in 2013. Starting in 2014, we conferred with representatives of Yuma County and Mojave County, two counties along the river in central Arizona, and representatives of CAP. When we embarked on the current DCP plan in July 2015, Commissioner Lopez asked for the group to be as small as possible. Arizona’s two representatives at that point were myself and Ted Cooke, the general manager of CAP. Mojave County and Yuma County were willing to rely on me to represent their interests in that process, but we continued to confer with them and other stakeholders with Colorado River water rights as we negotiated.

Joshua Dill: Now that the DCP has passed, what actions will the State of Arizona and the federal government undertake?

Tom Buschatzke: The State of Arizona, in order to build support for the DCP, has an intra-Arizona implementation agreement with several elements. One of those is the conservation of water for Lake Mead, either through system conservation—the creation of water that has no one’s name on it—or through intentionally creating surplus water, which can come out of Lake Mead at some future point under a set of conditions defined within the DCP. One of the key elements of the DCP, as compared to the 2007 plan, was to further incentivize the storage of water in Lake Mead, even if that storage was somewhat temporary, as is the case with this intentionally created surplus. About 400,000 acre-feet of water will be created for Lake Mead. At the same time, agricultural water use and the water use of some tribes and cities within CAP who will be experiencing incrementally increased reductions under the DCP will also be partially mitigated. To do this, CAP will use resources that include water that it has stored in Lake Mead through prior conservation efforts. The ADWR, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, the Gila River Indian Community, the Arizona Water Banking Authority, and the United States will offset their water use on at least a one-to-one basis. Increasing the amount of water coming out of the lake by creating new water going into the lake sounds complicated, and it is, but it was a way to make the mandatory reductions included in the DCP fall through Arizona’s priority system and honor folks’ water rights contracts. The state legislature passed legislation authorizing the director of the ADWR to sign and bind the State of Arizona to the interstate DCP. On the federal side, Reclamation will do its annual August 24-month study, which projects Lake Powell and Lake Mead elevations for the next calendar year. Based on those projections and looking at the DCP and the 2007 guidelines, operating criteria will be put in place for 2020. We expect, based on April’s 24-month study, that we will undergo the first level of reduction under the DCP. In Arizona, we call it tier zero. Arizona will take a 192,000-acre-foot reduction starting in 2020; Nevada will take an 8,000-acrefoot reduction starting in 2020. That will all be triggered

by Reclamation’s August 24-month modeling study, which generally comes out around mid-August.

Another important thing to mention is the role of Mexico. Mexico is a participant in the DCP through the Binational Water Scarcity Drought Contingency Plan.

Under a treaty that the United States and Mexico entered into in 1944, Mexico gets 1.5 million acre-feet of water a year from the Colorado River. Since 1944, there have been over 320 minutes, or interpretations, added to the treaty.

In September 2017, the United States and Mexico signed Minute 323, which includes this binational plan. It is in parity and alignment with the lower basin DCP, meaning that Mexico will do the things that we’re doing, get the flexibilities we’re getting, and get the incentives we’ve created in a manner that is proportional to the amount of water they MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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receive. Mexico will also take a reduction starting in January 2020, assuming the 24-month study holds what we expect it to hold. Mexico’s participation is important because it means that all the Colorado River water users below Lake Mead are participating. Mexico actually signed onto the plan before we finalized it.

Joshua Dill: What are some of the approaches that Arizona water users are taking on conservation?

Tom Buschatzke: Since 1980, when Arizona passed the Groundwater Management Act, and starting effectively in 1987 when the regulatory programs were ramped up, we have had mandatory conservation requirements in our agricultural, industrial, and municipal sectors. Our agricultural and municipal users are very efficient and will continue to become more so. That law applies in the central corridor of Arizona, including Tucson, Phoenix, and Prescott—basically the area where 80 percent of our population lives. Outside the area where that law applies, especially in the Yuma area, where there is large-scale farming using a million-acre feet of Colorado River water, water users have become efficient in response to market forces. While we can always save a bit of additional water, there is no increase in efficiency that is going to create huge volumes of water. That is only going to occur through real reductions in use—by reducing farming or forcing the cities to cut back. The other factor to consider is that many of our municipal water users have water supplies in excess of their needs. That is because the Groundwater Management Act stated that cities, towns, and developments can only grow when they show that they already have adequate water supplies for the future. That incentivized the accumulation of supplies that go beyond municipalities’ needs. On the flip side, though, to achieve conservation we need to bolster the elevation of Lake Mead through intentionally created surplus, which is actually conservation.

There’s going to be some land fallowing by farmers, and in some cases, entities that currently store water underground will stop doing so and leave it in Lake Mead.

put together their thoughts, positions, and priorities. We will roll that into an Arizona-wide position. Arizona will probably reach out to the lower basin states and establish a basin-wide position, then reach out to the upper basin states to develop a collective plan. That process needs to start now.

Joshua Dill: What is your vision for the future?

Tom Buschatzke: I see a future for Arizona in which we continue to serve water users as we have for many decades. I see a future in which hard choices that have been made over many decades by many leaders continue to be made. I see a future in which Arizonans will reach consensus on the best way forward for the state. That will require lively debate. That is something we have a long history of doing when our backs start to get put up against the wall. We coalesce as a group and come forward with one position for the long-term good of the state. I see that continuing.

Joshua Dill: Was there anything you wanted to add?

Tom Buschatzke: I just want to emphasize one point.

Water management on the Colorado River has worked well when we make incremental steps. Sometimes there’s frustration among various user groups that we can’t make a bigger leap forward. I like to say that if you have a plan that is not implementable, it is not a plan, just a wish. We always have to keep that in mind. We will take incremental and attainable steps rather than regretting that giant leap forward that was never really feasible in the first place. There are political, optical, legal, and financial issues at play. That’s an important point for people to understand. M

Joshua Dill: What do you see as the next big issues that need to be tackled?

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Thomas Buschatzke is the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

For more information about ADWR, visit azwater.gov.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ADWR.

Tom Buschatzke: The DCP only runs through 2026. It is an interim agreement. At a hearing in the U.S. House of Representative in March, Congressman Raúl Grijalva stated that the DCP is a safe haven that allows the states and stakeholders to go off and negotiate the next phase of Colorado River management beyond 2026. That’s very important. The 2007 guidelines required the states to reconsult no later than December 31, 2020. From my standpoint, we are not going to wait anywhere near that long this time. We need to get rolling soon on the next incremental bargain, or maybe a grand bargain or a massive scheme for the river. Arizona entities need to coalesce and

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Jeffrey Kightlinger.

A Remarkable Achievement: Metropolitan’s Jeffrey Kightlinger on the DCP

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Kris Polly: Would you please explain the significance of the DCP from Metropolitan’s point of view?

Jeffrey Kightlinger: We think it’s one of the more significant agreements we’ve made on the river. The last 20 years have seen a lot of progress with the basin states working together in a collaborative and cooperative manner. Of course, nothing sharpens people’s attention like a severe drought. Everyone knows we’ve been in a severe drought on the Colorado River, and we are beginning to understand that climate change and other demands are just exacerbating the effects of this long-term drought. We are perhaps not in crisis mode today, but we are close to it—

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too close for comfort. Things have to be done and tough decisions have to be made. We started on this path in 2007 with the first shortage sharing guidelines on the river. It became pretty clear after 10 years that they simply weren’t robust enough to protect us from reaching crisis mode.

I think it’s quite remarkable that the seven states and Mexico were able to get together and agree on voluntary restrictions. These were not imposed—the states agreed to them. They set aside water law, water rights, and priority systems, and thought about what they needed to do to protect the system. I think it’s a significant and remarkable achievement and a real demonstration of what we’re going to need to do in the future.

Kris Polly: With the passage of the DCP as a law and its signing by the states, what are the next steps?

Jeffrey Kightlinger: The agreements are already working as intended. One of the goals of the DCP was to encourage people to start storing water early, and a lot of that is taking place. We are fortunate enough to have good hydrology in the Colorado River basin this year, and you’re seeing people taking aggressive efforts to use the new agreements in the manner in which they were intended. Southern Nevada is storing water. The Central Arizona Project is storing water. Metropolitan is going to put probably close to 400,000 acre-feet of water into Lake Mead this year. By the end of 2019, we expect Metropolitan to have a million acre-feet in Lake Mead,

PHOTO COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN WATER DISTRICT OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

he Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is a state-established cooperative of 26 member agencies, including cities and public water agencies, that serve about 19 million people across 5,200 square miles stretching from Oxnard to San Diego. One of Metropolitan’s major sources of water is the Colorado River, water from which is conveyed to the Los Angeles area via a 242-mile aqueduct built by Metropolitan. As such, Metropolitan has a crucial interest in the future of the Colorado River, and it played a part in negotiating the recently executed drought contingency plan (DCP).

In this interview, Jeffrey Kightlinger of Metropolitan speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about the implementation of the newly enacted DCP legislation and about what agreements will be necessary in future years.

ADVERTISEMENT which equates to about 12–13 feet. Southern Nevada and Arizona are going to add a significant amount of water to Lake Mead as well, about 200,000 acre-feet combined.

People are taking advantage of the DCP immediately, which is good news for Lake Mead and the river.

We need to still work through some of the mechanics of the DCP. How do we most effectively use the new storage provisions? How do we coordinate interstate storage sharing provisions? The upper basin states are going to start working on their DCP and trying to store water in Lake Powell, but there are challenges that have to be overcome before they can achieve that goal. There’s quite a bit of work for all of us to focus on for the next 12 months.

Starting in 2020, we need to start planning for the future beyond the DCP. It is only a short-term agreement; it just pushes us through the end of 2026. We need longterm guidelines to take its place starting in 2027. In this business, 6 years is not a long time. We need to figure out the mechanics of implementing and executing the current DCP and then immediately get to work on figuring out the long-term guidelines.

the Colorado River is so important to the American Southwest, it’s our duty to make sure that it is sustainable in the face of long-term drought and climate change.

Kris Polly: How can the Colorado River system be made more sustainable?

Kris Polly: Would you tell us about the process of negotiation that led to the DCP?

Jeffrey Kightlinger: The lower basin states need to deal with what our friends in Arizona like to call the structural deficit. We are 1 million acre-feet or more in the hole. We’re going to have to deal with that. Our hope is that there is a combination of demand-management and augmentation projects that can help us make up that deficit over the long term.

The upper basin states have to work out how they can store water in Lake Powell and how they can develop conservation programs. They will need to figure out a way to track water conservation and use reduction and document that the water being put into Lake Powell is truly conserved water. We’ve developed those mechanisms in the lower basin; the upper basin is going to need to do that as well so that it can become truly sustainable.

Jeffrey Kightlinger: Some people are saying that the DCP took too long—5 years of discussion. I actually think it came together quite quickly. After several years of preliminary discussions, most of the work to complete the DCP was done in 36 months. To put together something this complex—involving 10 tribes, 7 states, and 2 nations—in a 36-month period speaks to the level of cooperation and collaboration that’s been developed on the Colorado River since 2000. I think that bodes well for what we’re going to see in 2026.

Kris Polly: What is your message to your fellow river partners?

Jeffrey Kightlinger: We’ve done a great job working collaboratively to deal with a crisis. The next step is moving beyond that and truly making the river sustainable. It’s going to take a lot of interstate cooperation and possibly interstate programs. We have worked effectively on the pilot system-conservation projects that we’ve funded throughout the upper and lower basins. We need to put those programs on steroids. We’re going to need Congress to cooperate and help us with funding. We’re also going to have to step up and show that we can collaborate on reduction, augmentation, and interstate programs. Because

Kris Polly: What is your message to Congress about the DCP moving forward?

Jeffrey Kightlinger: We’ve shown that we can work on critically important issues in a bipartisan, cooperative, and collaborative manner. We put aside litigation tools, we put aside priority systems and water rights, and we worked to find solutions that work for the greater good.

We need Congress’s help in that. The Colorado River basin represents a significant amount of the nation’s GDP. Forty million people and over 4 million acres of farmland in the American Southwest rely on Colorado River water. It is in the national interest to work with us and to help us.

Congress stepped up to the plate and passed the DCP in remarkably quick fashion, and the president signed it into law. We’re going to need that sort of attention and help as we move towards 2026 and beyond.

Kris Polly: Would you like to say anything about the situation with the Salton Sea? Jeffrey Kightlinger: At the eleventh hour, the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) determined that it would not be signing the DCP. It had been part of the negotiations throughout the process, but at the end, it decided that it would not be able to sign the DCP absent a federal funding commitment for the Salton Sea. We’ve carefully designed the DCP not to affect the Salton Sea, because we know of the significant environmental issues associated with it. IID has acknowledged that the DCP does not affect the sea, but nonetheless, it felt this was the appropriate time for federal funding for the sea and that it would not be able to execute the DCP absent that.

The Metropolitan board decided to step up and assume all of IID’s obligations on behalf of California. When we did that, we told IID we supported their quest to get federal funding for the Salton Sea. We support action on MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT the Salton Sea, but we felt the DCP was too important to wait for the resolution of the Salton Sea issue, which is progressing on its own parallel path. We felt we couldn’t wait any longer, and we moved forward. I believe that there are still opportunities to work with IID on the DCP going forward. IID will have to decide when it feels comfortable coming back to the table and working with the rest of the states. M

Jeffrey Kightlinger is the general manager of Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He can be contacted at officeofthegeneralmanager@mwdh2o.com.

Jeffrey Kightlinger at a Metropolitan meeting.

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THE INNOVATORS

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An APANA motherboard.

Apana’s Intelligent Water Management Platform

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or companies with numerous buildings and installations spread out over a wide geographical area, water use malfunctions can be hard to pinpoint. When a specific device or installation is broken, leaking, or wasting water, the company may have only a general sense that something is going wrong. That is where APANA comes in. Its Internet of things (IoT) hardware and intelligent water management software uses big data and machine learning to identify anomalous water use patterns and provide specific suggestions about what may be going wrong. Information like this helps a building, a company, or an entire city to quickly respond to problems, increase efficiency, and manage its water use.

In this interview, Matt Rose, the chief executive officer (CEO) of APANA, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how APANA’s technology works and how it is revolutionizing water management.

plants for buildings that didn’t have access to municipal sewer systems, mainly retail buildings like Walmart or Costco stores in remote places. Ten years ago, Frank asked me to help him automate, monitor, and provide remote control capabilities for these sequencing batch reactor wastewater plants. After we sensorized and automated the plants, we noticed that there was generally a greater volume of effluent going into the wastewater plants than the designers had predicted. We then had to tell the owners that they could either build a bigger plant or we would need to come up with a system to manage their water use. Our customers asked us to develop water management tools, and that’s how APANA was born. We started with two pilots in Mexico City, which succeeded in reducing water consumption by over 30 percent.

We have continued to expand our products and services over the last 4 years.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Joshua Dill: Tell us about APANA today.

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Matt Rose: Today, we consider ourselves a leader in the emerging market of water management platforms in the commercial and industrial space. Many leading customers are focusing on utility efficiency, digitization, and conservation efforts to increase company value and stay ahead of competition. We provide an end-to-end solution in water to meet bottom line and sustainability goals.

We have 16 employees today and intend to expand rapidly. We just closed a series B funding round of $11 million; our lead strategic investor is Kurita Water

PHOTO COURTESY OF APANA.

Matt Rose: I am the CEO of APANA, a company that provides intelligent water management platforms for commercial, industrial, and smart city use. I have been involved in the past with new product development for hardware and software in the healthcare and utility industries, and I’ve applied those skills to lead the development of the systems that we have today.

APANA’s roots go back to work our founder, Frank Burns, did 25 years ago. He designed and built wastewater treatment

ADVERTISEMENT Industries from Japan. We will use the funding for growth and the continued expansion of our IoT products and the further development of our analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities. We are also beginning to expand into the smart cities market.

Two years ago, we received a series A investment with Kurita as the lead. Kurita has been an excellent partner and has begun channeling our Intelligent Water Management Platform within its customer base in Japan.

Joshua Dill: Do you make both the software and the hardware?

Matt Rose: Yes. We make IoT hardware using low-power, wide-area (LPWA) radio technology to connect water meters to networks and we also build the analytics stack to process the data. It is important for us to control both the front and back ends of the solution to be effective at a high level.

However, we do not make meters or sensors. We use offthe-shelf smart water meters that employ modern automatic meter reading protocols.

Joshua Dill: How does LPWA technology work and why is it important?

Matt Rose: LPWA technology focuses on lowering power consumption for battery-powered IoT radio communications. Data integrity is also a key requirement.

We use LoRa and narrowband-IoT/M1 technology in our IoT products that use a battery.

LPWA technology allows us to build a device smaller than a hockey puck that can perform edge calculations and stream water meter data to a network once every minute for 10 years, powered only by a battery. Another great thing about LPWA technology is its easy deployment. Any plumber can survey the environment and install our highresolution IoT hardware for a fraction of the cost of previous solutions.

In addition, we’ve found that LPWA technology is effective in difficult radio frequency (RF) environments, which helps with data-packet integrity. IoT hardware design is challenging because water meters are in difficult places such as vaults in parking lots, inside walls, or in equipment on roofs. To solve this, we hired a team of ex-military drone circuit board designers. They had the perfect skill set for our business: high-level experience in low-power technology, radios, and ruggedization. With their help, we have been able to create an IoT suite that can connect water flow meters to networks in difficult RF environments.

Joshua Dill: How does your Intelligent Water Management Platform work?

Matt Rose: An enterprise may have hundreds of buildings that are spread out geographically. We install water meters

THE INNOVATORS

in specific places and connect the meters to the internet using our IoT hardware. They stream data to the cloud at intervals anywhere from seconds to a minute in length.

The frequency depends on how water is consumed onsite.

Our system analyzes the real-time data and determines normal use patterns while also scanning for waste patterns. When waste patterns are identified, we’re able to send actionable information to our customers with a statistically based list of likely causes for the anomaly our platform is detecting. Whereas technicians in the past might have been told, “This large building is using 10 times as much water today as it did yesterday—go find the problem,” we provide specific information on the anomaly and a checklist for technicians to follow in order to find the source of the waste.

Our services also provide risk management for equipment that consumes water. The water consumption pattern shown by the equipment is an indicator of its overall performance. By catching anomalies in real time, we can extend the lifespans of certain pieces of capital equipment. If a scaling condition is observed early, it can be dealt with early. If too much water is going through the system or if more chemicals are being used than should be, we are able to stop it before the problem compounds.

Joshua Dill: What are some of the most common problems and sources of waste that your clients are trying to deal with?

Matt Rose: The most common problems we detect are failures in equipment that consumes water, including cooling towers, evaporative condensers, landscape irrigation installations, ice machines, food processing machines, and other types of commercial or industrial equipment. We catch failures of all sorts, including leaks, broken irrigation heads, stuck valves, and things being left on.

We can provide information as a business intelligence tool on whether an operation is running efficiently, especially when we have comparable data on other plants.

This also provides accountability for performance by equipment service providers. Catching sudden leaks in plumbing is only a small part of what we do.

Joshua Dill: How do you analyze the data that your meters record?

Matt Rose: We are a private network, so we don’t touch company networks. Our data is transferred to the cloud, where it is processed in real time by analytic engines to produce a sort of EKG profile of how the building or asset is consuming water. Normal patterns become obvious and abnormal patterns stick out. When we recognize abnormal patterns, we classify them and determine probable causes.

For example, if an ice machine fails in the middle of the MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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THE INNOVATORS

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night, it leaves a distinct pattern, which is detected after a certain threshold. We then provide the customer with a detailed checklist on what to check in order to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

Joshua Dill: Who are your customers?

Matt Rose: Our customers are traditionally enterprises that have multiple buildings across a large geographical range.

Our biggest customer is Costco Wholesale. Our Intelligent Water Management Platform is within all their North American facilities. We also give them reports on how their overall enterprise is performing, the outliers, and how we can help them achieve their targets. MGM Resorts is another customer. We have many modules within the Bellagio Hotel and we provide insights across many different areas. Fetzer Winery is another valued customer. It uses our platform as a business intelligence tool for its operational processes. We have also just announced that Walmart will be expanding its use of our technology to 14 of its stores.

Joshua Dill: What is the process of installation like for a new customer?

Matt Rose: We have a network of regional plumbers who are trained to perform a site visit to determine where to place a water flow meter. After approval, the plumber installs the meters and our IoT hardware. Once the platform is online, we conduct online training for the staff and verify alert notification and reporting preferences. It’s an automated service from that point on. Some customers use it as a security system for water; others view it as an intelligence tool.

Joshua Dill: How many countries are you currently active in?

Matt Rose: We’re in Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the United States, and we’re beginning the process of getting certified in Australia.

Joshua Dill: How do you find your new customers?

Joshua Dill: Are there any installations or companies that you’re not yet working with, but you think would be especially well suited to your technology?

32 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Matt Rose is the CEO of Apana.

He can be contacted at matt.rose@apana.com or (360) 746-2276.

PHOTO COURTESY OF APANA.

Matt Rose: We have a direct sales force that works to find industrial and commercial customers who are seeking expansion of their energy efficiency programs to include water or meet digitization and sustainability goals. We also find customers through conferences. With our series B funding, we’re beginning to actively seek channel partners and potential strategic partners in order to expand our technology within existing customer bases.

Matt Rose: We’re starting to get into the smart city realm with two cities. Questions we are trying to answer with our pilot programs include whether we can monitor all the evaporative cooling systems within a city in order to create a water efficiency initiative and whether the city can incentivize commercial and industrial customers to install the necessary equipment.

We have a study with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California regarding the value of our coolingtower and evaporative-condenser monitoring. As far as specific customers or enterprises go, we are continuing to find manufacturers, malls, and other enterprises where water is being consumed in a complicated environment.

We can provide visibility and value to their operations.

Many malls are looking at our platform to charge tenants for their actual consumption instead of covering water use under their triple net leases. We’re able to provide granular information on water use and to detect waste and inefficiencies within those environments, which can lower costs for everybody.

We are working with a couple of cities on proofs of concept. There is a lot of leakage within their distribution systems. Our technology could provide performance management or validation and identify where failures are occurring. Another big thing is extending the life of large city assets. If a city decides to do a commercial and industrial water savings initiative, that can keep a wastewater treatment plant going for several more years before it needs an upgrade. We think there’s a huge market opportunity at the city level.

We’re truly an IoT solution for water that can be applied to cities. There’s so much hype in the smart city business, and so much stuff that really doesn’t work in the water space. Connecting water assets to networks is hard.

We have solved that problem using LPWA technology. It is a game changer in that it makes effective smart water programs more viable from a cost and value perspective.

Today, less than 1 percent of commercial and industrial buildings manage water. We envision that in 10 years, 90 percent of commercial and industrial buildings will have a water management platform installed. Our goal is to be the gold standard. M

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FREESE AND NICHOLS EXPANDS CONSTRUCTION SERVICES AND WATER/WASTEWATER PLANNING TEAM IN NORTH CAROLINA We continues to grow in North Carolina with the addition of Construction Manager Matt Cartwright, PE, and Kristen Cartwright, PE, a Water/Wastewater Master Planning Project Engineer. Both Cartwrights most recently worked for Freese and Nichols in the Houston area. They have now joined the Raleigh office, which will deepen the expertise available to meet the needs of clients throughout the Southeast region.

Matt Cartwright:

Kristen Cartwright:

A Freese and Nichols Associate with more than 16 years of experience and will lead the firm’s construction services team in providing management, inspection, constructability reviews, cost estimating and other services in North Carolina and across the Southeast.

His expertise covers a wide range of disciplines, including water and sewer lines, pump stations and lift stations, membrane treatment plants, water and wastewater treatment plants, elevated and ground storage tanks, and general site development. He is NACE certified to provide coating inspections as well as inspection training.

Has provided master planning at Freese and Nichols for more than six years and developed more than 30 water/wastewater/ reuse master plans, CIPs, impact fees and water quality studies.

She has developed and updated multiple water/wastewater models using steady-state, extended-period simulation (EPS) and dynamic modeling and is proficient in WaterGEMS, InfoWater, SewerGEMS, InfoSewer and InfoWorks ICM. She is active in the American Water Works Association.

He currently is project manager for a team providing oncall services to the City of Durham. He also is assisting with development of a new elevated storage tank for the City of Hickory and with construction of sanitary sewer service at the Moncure Megasite for the City of Sanford.

She currently is assistant project manager on a water quality study for the City of Sanford and is involved in a hydraulic modeling assessment of the wastewater collection system serving South Durham for the City of Durham Department of Water Management.

“ Matt is a proven leader who provides focus, consistency and high quality ”

“They will be instrumental in our continued expansion in the Southeastern U.S.”

— Mike Wayts, North Carolina Division Manager for Freese and Nichols

— North Carolina Account Director Charles Archer

Freese and Nichols, Inc. is a professional consulting firm serving clients across the Southeast and Southwest United States. With sustainability in mind, Freese and Nichols plans, designs and manages infrastructure projects. It is the first engineering/architecture firm to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

w w w.f reese. co m

THE INNOVATORS

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Digitizing and Strengthening Board Governance with Diligent

Diligent's Boards platform, accessed from an iPad.

B

oard governance is a challenge for organizations large and small, including irrigation districts and other organizations in the water industry. Organizing board meetings, preparing materials, keeping participants updated, and carrying out votes can amount to a formidable task—and can create plenty of paperwork. Diligent is one company working to make that task easier, more efficient, and more secure. Its Boards portal allows organizations large and small to prepare and distribute materials to their boards of directors, update those materials on a real-time basis, and carry out meetings with increased efficiency.

In this interview, Trevor Vale, director of global sales at Diligent, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-InChief Kris Polly about what Diligent is bringing to conference and boardroom tables and how it can help irrigation districts across the country.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how long you’ve been with the company.

34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Kris Polly: Where are you from originally?

Trevor Vale: I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, and moved to New York City in 2000, where I’ve been ever since. I went to the University of Waterloo, where I got an honors degree in political science.

Kris Polly: Tell us tell about Diligent and its history.

Trevor Vale: Diligent was founded in the early days of 2000 and was formally created in 2001. At the time, it was focused on building secure intranet web portals, which were all the rage back then, and meeting the market demand for web development and creation. It was through that business model that Diligent came to work with the large asset-management firm SunAmerica and took its first steps into the governance space. Diligent was tasked with creating a secure intranet portal for use

by SunAmerica’s board of directors. The company asked us to reduce the amount of paper they had to produce for their quarterly board meetings. Diligent’s solution was built around digitizing that paperwork and presenting it through a secure intranet portal environment. We needed something robust enough to meet SunAmerica’s complex

PHOTO COURTESY OF DILIGENT.

Trevor Vale: I have been with Diligent since July 2016, and I currently head up the global sales group. I have 25 years of sales experience within the financial services vertical, and spent most of my career selling either at large multinationals like Reuters, where I spent 10 years, or at smaller, midsized startups, companies like CarryQuote or Xignite. Prior to starting at Diligent, I

managed a sales team at the Intercontinental Exchange, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange.

ADVERTISEMENT regulatory constraints—as an asset manager, SunAmerica had to comply with a ton of restrictions and regulations governing how board materials were distributed, maintained, or destroyed. Creating a product that could meet those strict requirements did take quite a bit of investment, which SunAmerica helped provide.

That relationship led us to more clients, and from that point, Diligent started to focus on the governance space. That is when the concept of the board portal slowly started to emerge. In 2010, Apple released its first iPad, and shortly thereafter Diligent developed its first app. This blew the doors wide open—it was a game changer. We could deploy our intranet concepts to the mobile platform.

Now directors didn’t have to sit around a desktop in the middle of the room or be dependent on their laptops. The iPad allowed directors easy access to board books and other content through the secure app.

At that point, Diligent started to double down on support and customer success. Early on, the founders of the company saw the need to create a robust customersupport infrastructure in order to ensure that boards of directors were comfortable with the new technology.

We made it a priority to conduct one-on-one training sessions with directors and administrators. Our continued commitment to customer service remains one of the key things that sets us apart from others in the marketplace.

In 2015, Brian Stafford joined Diligent as chief executive officer, bringing a new perspective to how the company functioned and where it invested its money.

This led to the acquisition of Diligent by Insight Venture Partners, a New York–based private equity firm.

Kris Polly: Would you walk our readers through Diligent’s governance services for boards of directors?

Trevor Vale: Diligent Boards is the core product that we provide to corporate directors and senior leaders.

Today, the users of the Boards platform include about 450,000 board members and senior leaders of more than 14,000 organizations. The platform is used in more than 90 countries around the world. Our standard agreement is a 12-month subscription, so our clients have the option to leave us every year, but we have a 98 percent clientretention rate.

How is our Boards platform used to improve the governance of our clients’ organizations? On the simplest level, we’re digitizing the director experience and removing paper from the equation. If you look at the board book–creation timeline, preparation for those quarterly meetings goes on throughout the year. It usually starts when the corporate secretary’s office or the general counsel starts to assemble the materials needed for the board books that the directors will use during those meetings. Our platform helps general counsels and administrators assemble those board books in an

THE INNOVATORS

efficient, quick manner. Our platform also includes features like board book archives, a resource center with searchable reference materials, agenda builders, and digital voting tools. Time and time again, administrators tell us that our platform saves them a lot of time. They don’t have to collate paper copies anymore or send out constant revisions to fix minor mistakes. When they revise materials on our platform, those revisions are automatically made to everyone’s copy of the board book, and notifications of those revisions can be sent to directors automatically.

From the directors’ point of view, they can now come to board meetings with nothing more than a mobile device with our app installed. Their materials are provided through the app, which is encrypted and secure. The data is accessed in a way that prevents any access by third parties—including any attempted cyberattacks. At the meeting, board members can scroll through and search within their digital board books, highlight things and make annotations, and vote, all from their preferred mobile device. Our design ensures that the experience is fairly similar to the experience of using a paper book. The material is laid out on pages you can flip, just like in a paper board book.

Kris Polly: Would you tell us about the experience of the general managers who use your platform?

Trevor Vale: We look at governance in a broader way than many of our competitors. We refer to it as the Governance Cloud. Our products go beyond the meetings themselves. Of course, facilitating those quarterly board meetings in an efficient and secure manner is critical, but we are also thinking about the other components of the directors’ life cycle that we can start to participate in, and how we can help general managers in their governance work. How can we help them more easily consume data on a day-to-day basis? How can we help them stay informed about matters relating their boards and help them communicate with one another without the risk of being hacked?

I talked about how we make it easier to create the board books. We also have an agenda-builder feature that allows for a very succinct agenda to be presented to board members well before the actual board meeting. That incudes the locations of events like the dinner and the board meeting, but it can also get down into the weeds of the items to be discussed. The communication of that agenda has gotten a lot simpler, and it can be updated in real time, whether that means changing the location of the dinner or reprioritizing the agenda.

As the meeting is conducted, the Diligent platform allows board members to quickly find pages without having to flip through a long book. There is also a keyword search.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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THE INNOVATORS

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Kris Polly: If a board member brings up an issue that had been discussed 1 or 2 years prior, can that information be accessed?

Trevor Vale: We give our organizations the ability to archive board books as often and for as long as they choose. The kind of history they want to retain is up to them. Certain organizations are required to archive those materials forever or to dispose of board books immediately. We enable organizations to comply with whatever requirements and regulations apply to them.

To answer your question, most of our clients do have an archive that allows board members to find past meeting information quickly. So if you’re a director who has been sitting on a board for 5 years, you may have access to all of the board books that you used over that time span, and perhaps beyond that. If an organization needs to make 10 years of board books available, it can do that. If regulations and rules permit, directors can also archive their notes.

They could go back three meetings and pull up notes that they made then. It is up to the organization to determine the appropriate retention policy.

Kris Polly: How can the platform be used to send messages?

Trevor Vale: There is a feature in Diligent Boards that allows a director to add a virtual annotation—it looks just like a sticky note on a piece of paper—to a page of board materials. If the organization has this feature enabled, that annotation could actually be sent to a number of people.

That is one method of communication. It is encrypted and can be disposed of as soon as the meeting adjourns.

The platform can also send out updates. All directors could be sent a notification that something has changed in the board book. Diligent also provides a secure, encrypted communication tool called Messenger that allows boards to move away from using unsecured email.

Kris Polly: Would you give our readers an idea of how the subscription is priced?

36 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Kris Polly: Would you give our readers an idea of how much the service might cost for them?

Trevor Vale: Well, I will tell you that the 14,000 organizations that use Diligent today, from the smallest nonprofits and private companies to the largest multinational corporations and investment banks, are all starting to consider good governance as an important component of what they do. Based on the usage model, it seems to work for organizations of all sizes.

Kris Polly: What is your message for irrigation district boards of directors and managers?

Trevor Vale: We are the leaders in defining a brand-new category of modern governance. We believe the enterprise risk and governance base is largely being underserved.

Our Boards platform has a long history and is highly secure. We’ve got a really good ownership structure that routes a lots of money back to R&D, ensuring that we’re constantly keeping our product up to date. Our laser focus is on digitizing, securing, and enabling effective governance, not just for directors themselves but for the entire community around them. We know the governance space in a way that, frankly, others in the market just don’t. We’ve created things like the Diligent Institute to start providing research and thought leadership on global governance practices, based on all the interactions we have in a given year with our 450,000-strong user community.

In talking to them, we learn a lot about governance and what is on their minds. We run events each year in which we bring directors together just to get a sense of what’s on their minds and how we can solve the problems our clients have. Security, customer service, and reliability are all part and parcel of what we do. M

Trevor Vale is the global sales director at Diligent. He can be reached at tvale@diligent.com.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DILIGENT.

Trevor Vale: Generally, our pricing is based around the number of directors or users—we define users as directors or administrators—and the number of committees. Often our clients will use the platform not just for their main board, but for the audit committee or the subcommittees that may exist under that board hierarchy. Clients have the option to add Governance Cloud modules to the Boards platform, including Diligent Messenger, questionnaires, evaluations, and minutes. For our 24/7/365 customer service, there is no charge at all—that comes with every subscription, whether your organization has a small user community of 8 or a user base of 200. We will also train directors and staff on site with no limitation. It’s

not uncommon for us to appear at the first two board meetings during which our clients are using the Boards platform and wait in the lobby, so that if there are any questions, we can answer them on site. Sometimes we even go to directors’ homes or offices to train them on the platform.

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